How a national advisory firm cut downtime and moved to co-managed IT

One IT manager, four offices and 180 people. Nothing was broken exactly, but everything was late. Escalations queued behind whichever fire was largest, after-hours cover meant one person’s mobile, and annual leave was a genuine business risk.

The firm did not want to hand IT over. It wanted its IT manager to stop being a single point of failure.

Co-managed, with the split written down in the first fortnight. The internal team kept the service desk and the relationships. AWD took second and third level escalation, security, after-hours and the quarterly strategy work.

Shared monitoring and ticketing gave both teams one view, and escalation paths went into named senior engineers rather than a general queue.

Downtime fell 73% and resolution times improved 2.4x, but the number the firm quotes is the one we did not measure: their IT manager took two consecutive weeks of leave for the first time in four years.

Roles backfilled: none.